Weasel

I stumbled over an entry at Wikipedia’s style guide on the use of weasel words:

Weasel words are words or phrases that seemingly support statements without attributing opinions to verifiable sources, lending them the force of authority without letting the reader decide whether the source of the opinion is reliable.

The funny bit comes after that where they take Montréal as an example:

The emergence of weasel-worded statements often has its roots in biased or normative statements, e.g. “Montréal is the best city in the world”. Often, people who are convinced that some statement or other is true naturally want to see it mentioned in the articles where it is relevant; however, statements such as these tend to jump out at the reader as obvious opinion-stated-as-fact and quickly get rooted out. The problem of the weasel words starts when an editor realizes this and attempts to remedy the situation by modifying the statement to at least admit that it is not necessarily factual, e.g. “Some people say Montréal is the best city in the world. ”

I’ll try to avoid weasel words in the future even though Montréal is the best city in the world.